


Thicker Than Water

by archea2



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Episode: s13e21 Beat the Devil, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Episode: s13e21 Beat the Devil, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 00:15:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14556714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: A Wincest coda to Season 13, Episode 21, "Beat the Devil".





	Thicker Than Water

Dean lasts half of a sunset and a kid’s ill-timed attempt at comfort before the Purgatory simile kicks in.

It’s been there before, mind you. There in his mind, idling, only Dean was too deep in the thick of it to pay it notice. There was a rift to tend  to, unless there was a Ketch, a quest, a Charlie, and they all made enough of a difference that the simile ducked back into its mind corner. But then the kid toasts his absent "friend", and bam! the past mortgages the present. Dean is thirty again, stuck in another wasteland; looking for a passage out and back to light and life and rest, which are really three words for Sam. But the passage is behind them, his face now tells the kid, a dead-end - and Dean still in it, up to his eyes. Only his feet trekking campward. 

Only darkness visible, and that jet of blood spurting out of Sam’s too-too-human neck.

But it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay, because Dean has found his way back into the dark before. Same old, same old. Sammy across some line or other, Dean blowing the line. Again and again, Sam beyond his reach, and again, Dean doing what the gust of wind does to the salt trail, the whittling of a knife to the pentagram – breaking the line, no matter how taboo, so he can cross over to his brother.

What’s that smart-ass quote Sam likes to say is all him? _I must do this. I can’t do this. I will do –_

He won’t, actually, because that’s when Sam schlepps back among the living, pale- and shamefaced, Lucifer in tow, and Dean...

Dean can’t take it.

He breaks out of their camp circle, now made complete by Lucifer and son, and makes his steps take him down a path. Heads to what he can only assume is a stream, though the one sound to be heard is of wind, not water. The ground recalls itself to Dean’s feet – woodsy but dead, its dust ash-coloured, because every freakin’ Apocalypse Now world has to be soaked in drab camouflage spray paint, _every_ time. Only the twigs under his feet cracking, until the sound is doubled, and Sam is half-striding, half-stumbling at his side, one arm groping for Dean’s shoulder.

"Dean," Sam says haltingly. When Dean doesn’t halt, Sam’s booted foot butts in between his, tipping him sideways. Sam’s hands catch his fall, only to ease him to the ground. "Will you – goddamnit, Dean, it’s me."

Dean is not so sure. Sam’s face is still drained; made younger, tenderer by the daze of coming back, which Dean still recalls from nine years ago: that neither-here-nor-there mood, before resurrection felt truly for keeps. Sammy’s hands are on his knees now, begging, as they did when Sam took his first steps into the world and Dean was at every step’s end with open arms and _proud of you, kiddo_. Sam begs, and Dean turns, and all’s as well in this world as can be, until Sam goes for a two-armed hug and a hand firmly pillowing Dean’s neck, and Dean taps out. 

(When Dad first taught him poker, that was one thing he said. _A rookie with a strong hand will show you strong. But somebody got a weak hand, they may go for a reverse tell and make themselves out to be strong. No two ways to trip’em, son – you outbid._ )

And so he fists a handful of Sam’s hair and wrestles his white-faced, vulnerable little brother onto _his_ chest, Because if he lets Sam take the upper hand, comfort and caress him into moving on, then the horror in the cave is bupkis. Sam’s pain is bupkis. And Sam’s death. Is. Nothing more than the dead-end pointed out by Cas, an inconvenience to be left behind. In the dark. In the end.

"I didn’t look for you," he tells Sam, rough-voiced, keeping his mouth close to where his fist is still tangled with Sam’s hair. Sam says something into his chest, probably about Maggie, or Mom and Jack, or Dean making the honorable choice, and Dean shakes his head so that his lips will rub against Sam's scalp, the whiff of blood from Sam’s neck mobbing his nostrils.

 _Water_ , his mind growls, while his hand reaches for his bag and the bottle he’s filled from the rainwater barrel at the camp. But Sam’s neck, right there under under his nose, is like a close-up that cannot be touched – barred by Sam’s indifference to it. Sam, who gulps down his own trauma like a dose of painkillers so he can tend to Dean, even now, even as Sam looks up into his face and licks his lips a little tentatively. 

Before he knows, Dean has bent his head again and placed his mouth to the blood.

The blood is dry, with a dusty, rusty tang to it. Dean doesn’t let himself stop at the tang, or Sam’s startled cry. He laps at Sam’s neck and throat, strongly, the flat of his tongue pushed up against each streak so it will take in the taste and archive it in Dean’s stronghold of memories. _Don’t make me lick your damn face_. Sam gasps again, a mix of breath and clear saliva, and Dean smiles against the blood, parting his lips to give each lick more scope. _The black veins on Sam’s body, Darkness's claim_. Laps and laves and cleans and kisses at the strong pure throat, where angels hoard their grace and Sam his mortality. Pledges himself to its pulse.

Sensation, finally, resurfaces. Fussy, messy. In Sam’s hand against his cheek, cradling it in his entire palm. In the weariness, unbridled now, a claim on Dean's every muscle. But Sam has to be feeling them, too. Sam is here and feeling, and that will do. That will more than do.

"You’ve got my blood all over your mouth. Dude, gross."

Dean only smiles a little.  _You bloodsucking freak._ He can't strong-arm the past and every dark pain it gave Sam, much as he wants to. He's all too aware of that... 

"Mom’s worried about you," Sam says, kissing his hairline the way Dean used to when soothing him as a kid. "And Jack needs us. Come talk to them?"

"Sure, Sammy. In a moment."

 

... but he can still outbid the past.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> (It's my headcanon that Sam told Dean about the voicemail at some point, when they were not too busy hunting or being hunted.)


End file.
